CHAPTER 11:
Individual Differences in Emotionality
Chapter 11 Outline
Introduction
Emotion regulation
Attachment
The “Strange Situation” and styles of attachment
Internal working models of attachment
Factors affecting style of attachment
Warmth and the socialization of emotions
Warmth
Learning to speak about emotions
Effects of modeling
Responses to some emotions but not others
How cultures affect the development of emotionality
Emotion schemes: bridges from childhood to adult relationships
Temperament
Biases of emotion at the core of temperament
Stability of temperament
Genetic basis of temperament
Temperament and parenting
Affective biases, adult personality, and the course of life
Patterns of childhood emotionality that extend to adult life
Emotion is central to adult personality dimensions and traits
Individual differences in emotion shape how we construe the world
Effects of emotional dispositions on the course of life
Summary
Further reading
Chapter 11: Lecture Notes
There are two traditions related to individual differences and emotion. The first, which we will explore today, looks at emotional response tendencies as a basis of personality; this argues that emotions are at the core of personality and say a lot about the course of our lives. A second tradition associated with Lazarus looks at how we cope with emotions; we will look at this next time.
You have learned about the Big Five of personality traits; Oliver John is a pioneer in Big Five research. The Big Five traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. They exist across cultures; they predict behavior; they have a biological basis; we readily perceive them in others; and they are real and heritable. Extraversion refers to gregariousness; conscientious people are goal oriented; neurotic people have strong negative emotional responses to events; agreeable people are warm, kind and loving, and have pictures of kittens on the walls of their dorm rooms. People open to experience are creative and respond to art and like to explore.
We can think of these in terms of basic dispositions to respond to events; they show up early in life in people and have a strong biological basis. These are stable; they have been studied over a 30-year period and tend to persist. There is some change in personality over time, but there is far more stability. Caspi, who studies personality change, finds that it is very hard to find evidence for it, while it is very easy to find evidence of stability over time. Personality is genetically based and heritable; in comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins, researchers find that monozygotic twins, who share the same genes completely, are twice as similar as fraternal twins. About 50% of the variance in personality is genetically explained. There are specific biological processes related to ANS arousal associated with personality. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, may be related to extraversion and approach behavior, how personality traits shape the situations and relationships we get ourselves in, and these allow us to express our emotional tendencies.
We create contexts that allow us to express our personalities. We react differently to the same stimuli according to differences in personality. People high in neuroticism are very reactive to conflict; highly extraverted people do not react. Selection is important. We enter relationships and our traits evoke responses in others; our personality characteristics bring out qualities There is something called the “play it forward” hypothesis, whereby one’s own expressive behavior gets passed on to others who pass it on in turn.
Carol Malatesta argues that there are variations in emotional tendencies from the first moment of life. Maternal cortisol affects the environment of infants in the womb. So, from the first moment of life, there are variations in emotional tendencies; and this influences how you think, feel, and behave. The nature of your physiology, experience, appraisal tendencies, ANS tendencies, and emotion is tied to all this.
Erika Rosenberg, in 1998, provided evidence that emotions are at the core of personality. Anger-prone people appraise the world in hostile ways. They perceive ambiguous stimuli as having hostile intentions. They see hostility everywhere. Hostile boys and girls, according to Glen Dodge, will be given ambiguous stimuli, like being bumped playfully, and perceive it as hostile; they are quick to attribute blame and hostile intent. Malatesta took photos of elderly people in their 60s, and measured their tendencies to express different emotions by self-report. They asked them to look as neutral as possible and took photos of them. Subjects who had a tendency to be angry, had angry expressions when they were asked to look neutral. So, even when they were trying to look neutral, they still looked angry. Anger furrows your brow; if you go through life experiencing a lot of anger, the static, neutral expression on your face may be configured in a way that is hostile.
Research in the 70s showed that hostile people are somewhat more prone to cardiovascular problems. If you frustrate hostile people, they have more elevated blood pressure and it takes longer to go down. If researchers confront them in a direct way, they have an elevated cardiovascular response. The researcher Barefoot found that hostile people have more cardiovascular problems.
Kagan has done a lot of controversial research with fearful, shy, kids. Caspi has done work following shy kids into adulthood. Let me say that I was shy as a kid, and that this is in no way a put-down of shyness. William James and Darwin, to mention two great figures in this class, were shy. Kagan, in his early work, looked at fearful kids at three years of age, and followed them into adulthood. They liked structured jobs and avoided social interactions. Inspired by LeDoux and cortisol and ANS research, he expanded his research to try to understand the physiology of fearful kids. He found fearful kids at four months old and followed them for ten years. Kagan believes that fearful kids have sensitive amygdalas that are responsible for their elevated fear responses and cortisol releases. Elevated sympathetic arousal is associated with elevated responses of amygdalas, which triggers biological responses. This is a controversial idea. Kagan exposes four-month-old fearful infants to novel stimuli, while the Mom smiles supportively. Twenty-five percent of kids are fearful; they cry easily and are agitated in their responses to novel stimuli. Thirty-seven percent of kids are very calm, don’t cry and approach the stimuli. The fearful kids should have changes across the lifespan. He assessed the kids at 9, 14, and 21 months, by showing them novel stimuli, like odd tastes; shy kids show more fear, while calm kids do not. He studied them at age 7 on the playground; shy kids tend to sit back and observe awhile before engaging with others. They spend 40% of their time watching. At age 5, if you tell the kids a scary story, the shy kids have elevated heart rates, while the shy kids have stronger heart rates in response to sour tastes than non-shy kids. They have bigger pupils in response to stress.
Cortisol allows you to flee a predator; it shuts down your immune system. Shy kids have greater cortisol responses to stressful stimuli. Stress causes your vocal cords to tighten, restricting the range of expression. Shy kids have less intonation when they speak. Shy kids are more likely to have blue eyes in Kagan’s study. He caught a lot of heat for this. A hormone released in the womb darkens the eyes of the infant; maternal cortisol, which is released when stressed, inhibits the production of this. So more stress on the mother prevents the darkening of the eyes. Shy kids have 62.5% blue eyes and 37.5% brown. Calm kids have 23% blue and 77% brown eyes. The hormone is just one factor in influencing eye color, of course. The claims about the amygdala are a weak link. This is a hypothesis that Kagan is trying to prove with Davidson.
There is evidence Moms hold shy kids more during stress. Also, about 15% of the shy and fearful kids change categories over the course of development.
Caspi looked at the lives of shy adults, who had been shy as children over 30 years. Teachers had identified them as shy at age 8 or 9. He found that, as adults, they married and took stable jobs at later ages. The calmer kids married at 22.5; the shy ones at 25.5. Calmer kids got steady jobs at 25.3, while shy kids got jobs when they were 28.5 on average.
Most studies of emotion deal with negative emotion. It’s a challenge to study positive emotions like love, compassion, gratitude, and so on. Ravenna Helson, here at Berkeley, has followed the 1960 graduating class of Mills College now for more than 40 years; it is the best longitudinal study of women, along with one at Radcliffe. She follows their life and marital satisfaction, how happy they are, and various factors related to well-being. Leanne Harker and I, in 2001, coded the facial expressions of these women based on their yearbook photos for Duchenne smiles. With a Duchenne smile, the lips go up, the eyes contract with some crow’s feet, the top of the cheek goes up a little, and the lower eyelid tenses. We also coded for beauty, for social desirability, for their tendency to say nice things to people. Good-looking people have lots of good things happen to them; they get shorter jail sentences. We had the theory that positive emotions do good things for us. Smiles help us reduce stress; smiling and laughter calm us down during stress. Smiles also connect us to other people, which may be the single most important thing for people. Smiles encourage cooperation, affiliation, and intimacy.
We found that women with more positive facial expressions, at 21, 27, 43, and 52 years of age, had less negative emotion on a daily basis. They were more affiliated with others, more goal oriented, and more successful in reaching their goals. This was true when we controlled for beauty and other factors like social desirability. The bigger the smile, the more likely they were to be married six years later. And 30 years later, they were happier in relationships. So at every stage of life for 30 years, they were more satisfied. There is increasing evidence that inducing positive emotion causes people to be more creative, have better immune systems, and healthier relationships. People who smile and laugh in stressful situations in lab experiments become calmer more quickly. It is hard to get causality in experimental studies.
Emotion Regulation. A lot of mental disorders can be looked at in terms of emotion regulation. How should we act on or respond to an emotion? Should we talk to people about it? Act on it? Think about it? What do we do when we have these complex, powerful things called emotions?
There is a tension in the literature. How does emotion regulation relate to personal well-being? Pennebaker has done a lot of research on language and emotional expression, about talking about, writing about, labeling, giving meaning, and narrative to emotion. What happens when we write about trauma, or tell others about it in confession or therapy or with friends? He finds that this way of regulating emotion gives us structure and calms us physiologically. Writing about trauma, like 9/11, or the Holocaust and the intense feelings we have helps people do better. People feel better, function better and relate to others better. It gives us insight, and reduces the physiology of inhibited emotion. He has a group of people write about their feelings related to a painful event, while a control group writes about the factual dimension, and gets these findings.
James Gross, who got his Ph.D. at Berkeley under Bob Levenson, presents complementary evidence. He brought people to the lab and had them watch a painful amputation and asked them to maintain a totally neutral facial expression so that no one could tell what they were feeling. So they were suppressing any emotion they were feeling. When people do this, they have an elevated sympathetic ANS, with increased heart rate and blood pressure and more blinking. In recent research, Gross brought two people to the lab and told one to inhibit any negative emotion; their stress levels go up. What’s interesting is that the other person’s stress levels go up also, even though they don’t know that the person is inhibiting negative emotion. So being around someone who is inhibiting negative emotion is bad for you. This line of research suggests that talking about your emotions and going to confession and therapy will help you feel better.
Bonanno has done research on repression, a concept derived from Freud; it is one of the eight or nine defense mechanisms. In repression, you have a stressful response to something, but don’t consciously acknowledge it to yourself. You are not aware of the stress. Freud says this is a great source of difficulty. How do we study this? It is hard – you are feeling stress, but you are not consciously aware of it. One way is to get people in a stressful situation where they have sympathetic ANS arousal with increased heart rate, and measure their subjective report of distress. Bonanno talks about the verbal autonomy discrepancy. The ANS physiology shows stress, but the verbal report of the person does not. People say they feel fine although they are showing the physiology of distress. He studied people during bereavement; they had lost their romantic partners, on average, about six months before. They were, on average, 45 years old. He asks them to tell him about the person who died. It is a very intense experience with a lot of crying. It’s very tragic. He measures the degree of verbal autonomy. How much is the verbal report autonomous from the physiological? If it is high, then people are repressing. Some people have a high ANS response, but report no distress at all. Then, one or two years later, he looks at how the people are doing. He studies a measure of how well people are coping with grief that looks at 30 symptoms. Are they depressed, angry, disoriented in their thinking, anxious, unable to let go of their mate? People who were repressing emotion are doing much better than people who felt a lot of subjective distress with high ANS responses. This suggests that distancing and dissociating from emotional pain is highly functional. The same findings have shown up with eight- and nine-year-old girls who are victims of sexual abuse. The repressors are doing better over the course of life.